Poetry Evening

Beatriz Villacañas was born in Toledo. She is a poet, essayist, narrator and literary critic. She is a Doctor in English Studies and obtained her PhD at Universidad Complutense of Madrid, where she is Senior Lecturer of English and Irish literature. She is a member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and History of Toledo.

Poetry has always been an essential part of Beatriz Villacañas´s daily life. She experienced it at the side of her father, Juan Antonio Villacañas. The sound of the keys of Juan Antonio’s Hispano Olivetti type-writer rocked her to sleep at night. For Beatriz Villacañas, to write poetry is much more than just an undertaking: it is a form of life, it is to realise that it is the poem which asks to be written, and that when that happens there is no way out but to write it.

She has translated English and Irish poets such as: W. Shakespeare, W.B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Michael Hartnett and Brendan Kennelly. Due to family and professional reasons, Ireland has long been her second country. Related to the latter are her numerous articles on Irish literature and Irish authors and her book Literatura Irlandesa, the first complete study on Irish Literature in the Spanish language. She has been invited to An Tobar (The Well): Meetings between Irish and Spanish poets (Madrid and Limerick University). She was invited poet to Féile na Bealtaine, International Poetry Festival, Dingle, Ireland, 2007. Together with the Irish poet and translator Michael Smith she has selected, introduced and translated poems of Juan Antonio Villacañas: Juan Antonio Villacañas: Selected Poems, Shearsman Books, UK, 2009. On February 2012 she was invited to give a lecture at the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin, on the occasion of Ireland’s European Presidency.

Poetry Books:
Jazz, 1991

Allegra Byron, 1993

El Silencio está lleno de nombres (Silence is Full of Names),
awarded Ciudad de Toledo International Prize for Poetry, 1996

Dublín, awarded Primera Bienal Internacional Eugenio de Nora Prize, 2001

El Ángel y la Física (The Angel and Physics), 2005

La gravedad y la manzana (Gravity and the Apple), 2011

Testigos del asombro (Witnesses of Wonderment), 2014
Beatriz Villacañas appears in different studies and anthologies, both national and international, and several of her poems can be found in a great number of literary magazines from Spain, South America and EEUU.

Among other important Awards and Recognitions, the town of Boadilla del Monte (Madrid) has established an international Poetry Prize with the name of Beatriz Villacañas and the poet Carmen de Silva.

Beatriz Villacañas´s poetry stands basically on reflection and probing into themes such as love, death, life and suffering, together with a marked preoccupation about transcendence and spiritual questions: “El tiempo nos esculpe y nos destruye, / la eternidad aguarda y nos rescata.”(“Time sculptures and destroys us/ Eternity awaits and rescues”). “Tierra, voy a dormir contigo,/ si alguna vez despierto,/ compartiremos juntos/ la inmortalidad” (Earth, I am going to sleep with you/ If I wake up some day/We will together share/ immortality”. “Cada descubrimiento alimenta un enigma nuevo” (“Each discovery nourishes a new enigma”).

Beatriz Villacañas is also a columnist in ABC Artes & Letras, El Cultural de Castilla la Mancha.

(Sponsored by the Spanish Embassy in Ireland.)

Ciaran Carson was born in Belfast in 1948. He is the author of nine collections of poems, including Belfast Confetti, First Language, and Breaking News. His prose works include Last Night’s Fun, a book about Irish traditional music; The Star Factory, a memoir of Belfast; Fishing for Amber: A Long Story; and a novel, Shamrock Tea, which was long-listed for the 2001 Booker Prize. His translation of Dante’s Inferno won the 2002 Oxford Weidenfeld Translation prize, and his translation of Brian Merriman’s Cúirt an Mhéan Oíche (The Midnight Court) appeared in 2005. A translation of the Old Irish epic Táin Bó Cuailnge was published by Penguin Classics in 2007. For All We Know (2008) was a Poetry Book Society Choice. Collected Poems was published in 2008. On the Night Watch (2009) and Until Before After (2010) were shortlisted for the Irish Times/ Poetry Now Award. A novel, The Pen Friend, appeared in 2009. Among the prizes he has won are the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Irish Times Irish Literature Prize, the Cholmondeley Award, and the Forward Prize. In 2011 he was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Literature by University College Dublin. Exchange Place (a novel) and In The Light Of (verse adaptations of prose poems from Rimbaud’s Illuminations) were published in 2012. His most recent book is From Elsewhere, translations from the work of the French poet Jean Follain, paired with poems inspired by the translations (Gallery Press 2014). Ciaran Carson is a member of Aosdána, the affiliation of Irish artists, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

(Sponsored by Poetry Ireland.)